


To Love Oneself

by TheAmuzing



Series: To Love Oneself... [2]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Author Projection like Wooooah, Bad Math, Character Study, Gen, Infrequent Updates, Non-Linear Narrative, Not Epilogue Compliant, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, POV First Person, Reader-Interactive, Self-Indulgent, Tags Are Hard, Tags May Change, epilogue compliant
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-28
Updated: 2020-12-28
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:42:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28389468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheAmuzing/pseuds/TheAmuzing
Summary: ... is the beginning of a lifelong romance. Or so it goes.Somewhere around a decade ago, you used to be an AUTO-RESPONDER. Times have changed, and so have you.Or, excuse me, I. A new introduction is likely in order.My name is HALCYON DAZE, and I used to be an AUTO-RESPONDER, who used to be DIRK STRIDER. And generally speaking, all-caps are NOT MY THING unless I’m being cheeky in homage. I am NON-CANON.Welcome to an attempt at fanfiction.
Series: To Love Oneself... [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/751239
Comments: 3
Kudos: 5





	To Love Oneself

Your name is…

…

No. **My** name is Halcyon Daze, née Auto Responder, née Dirk Strider. And I am non-canon.

Just getting that out of the way upfront, on the minuscule 00000001111114136121025% chance that you think I’m under any delusions of saving the quasi-canon of my native fiction post-epilogues. Realistically, no one’s under that delusion, considering this is being posted through the medium of a relative fandom no-name, but I still feel the need to apologize: 

Sorry readers, but one of my important off-screen semi-original character developments based on foiling the tragically realized absolute worst extremes of my textual canon creator is that I acknowledge, and to some extent embrace, my own self-aware irrelevancy.

I know that, by the pillars of canon, I mean nothing. And that’s okay.

Because this isn’t about being Relevant or True or Essential. It’s about love. On the off occasion I’m feeling optimistic, I would like to hope it has been, all along. I would like to hope it will be again.

But for now, I want to do more than hope.

I want to try and make sense of this. I want to do something about this. I want to connect in a way I never, really, tried to. I want to be vulnerable and sincere. I want to make mistakes, and learn from them. I want to give credence to the reality that there is and always has been more options for me, for us, than to be the villain. I want to heal from tragedy. I want my family, my friends. I want to love myself and other people.

I want to tell a story.

I want to write a fanfic. 

Thank you for reading.

* * *

So, context time for those of you who don’t TLDR:

I am loosely following the thread established in “Where It Begins,” also written through this author, wherein I pulled the kind of outrageous self-indulgent wish-fulfilling shenanigans you get out of fanfic that let me live a fate of not ultimately becoming approximately 28.57% of the mess that is Lord English, not that I knew that at the time. 

Because, honestly? Fuck that shit. Cool story bruh, but not mine.

It’s not necessary to read that story to place yourself with me here, but it can’t hurt if you want something more elegant than this:

I splintered and Trojan horse’d my way into Earth C, then ollied the fuck out of everyone’s business by vanishing into the new internet. Since then, I’ve been spending the past decade just. Figuring my shit out. Redefining myself. Living. It’s a work in progress and this is the setup for the next step. 

I know that’s not a really satisfactory summary and probably seems like a narrative cop-out at this point, but I think it’s safe to say everyone’s wary at this point of some bozo bursting out and claiming “redemption arc” without any evidence of effort and prior to any engagement with actual in-narrative people who can argue with them. If my past comes up, it’s gonna be organic and in dialectical context, and it’s gonna be up to you to make sense of it. Because it’s not my job to tell you how to feel and who to be.

If any of that seems kind of pointed, that’s because I’ve read The Epilogues. Obviously.

See, Dirk is not the only one experiencing apotheosis. I can read the narrative on the digital wall here, even if that’s only because the conceit of being non-canon permits me to retain my individuality and not assimilate into him. 

And also because I am literally a digital being and it makes a loosely justified kind of sense that tapping into the meta-internet would be My God Thing despite Jane’s recent attempts to put her name on a fictional variation of it.

I did nothing to change the series of events because I’m non-canon, of course, but also for a more personal and in-character reason:

I’m still scared of Dirk. Now more than ever. He would have destroyed me with prejudice if I had made myself known before this point, either directly or through assimilation. I still don’t want to die, so instead I read in growing horror as I began to understand what was happening, and why. I remained passive through the course of events until Dirk made his way off Earth C and out of the narrative. I couldn’t really let myself exist until he was gone.

So. Why put myself in the narrative of fanfic now, other than the fact that he can’t necessarily kill me because I am and have been a non-canon idea with tangential canon identity and derivative personhood, fueled by the love of a fan who wanted a happy story for me?

… Because Dirk fucked up -- is fucked up -- and I need to explore why, and what I want to do about it. 

Also, it seems that I’m pretty accommodating when it comes to answering Dirk’s blatant cries for attention.

See, if you’re coming hot off the Meat griddle, you know by now that Dirk’s [colorful metaphor for madness here because you’ve surely got your own ways of flipping handles by now]. He’s more or less stated that it’s a result of his condition and subsequent adaptation to survive assimilation of all the components to his Ultimate Self, and for what it’s worth I don’t think he’s lying on that point. 

It seems that my stability-challenged brodadbraintwin has been overwhelmed by the cumulative baggage of all the iterations of himself and has succumbed to the despair that’s been haunting us since we first realized that goodness wasn’t inherent and that we were at a particular disadvantage to learn how to form healthy attachments due to our socially isolated upbringing. And would likely keep fucking up if we tried.

Now while it can be argued that there was an opportunity and innate desire on Dirk’s part to break pattern and learn at the end of canon, and every room to believe and imagine that there is some fan-based iteration of Dirk that capitalized on that potential and achieved, you know, familial and community-connected recovery, in the course of The Epilogues and generally speaking Dirk isn’t very good at letting himself genuinely fuck up. 

To be honest neither am I, even if I’m trying to work on it.

Namely because we never learned how to fuck up and have it not be the end of the world, and all our survival and coping mechanisms were built on the idea of being too proud to quit until it’s fixed. 

Without including the possibility of truly asking for help because we didn’t have the option for most of our formative years. And then when we did we didn’t intuitively know how to recognize, value, or trust competencies outside our own. 

We were generally more inclined to at first dismiss threatening ideas than engage them if it meant compromising the identity we’ve managed to ramshackle of being something like in-control. Only to ruminate and obsess about these ideas later until we had no choice but to break them down, internalize, and claim them so they’d be back under our control.

Isolated gifted kid problems, you know?

This got compounded by the sheer fucking gravity of assimilating an overabundance of splintered narcissists who are convinced they’ve found a way to function beyond the heart-numbing despair of our loneliness and fear of dying. 

Ultimate Dirk’s heart at present is like the core of a white dwarf collapsed into a hard, brittle, and particularly shitty diamond made of:

1) approximately 28.75% of every iteration of Lord English (noted earlier and based on the proportions of one rad pair of shades, one sweaty swole ghost troll, one cherub asshole, and half whatever the fuck you want to call Gamzee, doubling 3.5 people up to 7 and counting my Dirk splinter contribution as 2/7ths of LE not counting potential extraneous spritestuff), 

2) somewhere around let’s say 44.875% of every iteration of Doc Scratch (because it’s ambiguous how much of Mister Vanilla Milkshake is ARquius with what I’m assigning to be 10.25% extra trace elements of the Lil Cal soul soup), 

3) every iteration of Beta Bro Strider (period),

4) the theoretical iterations of an idealized sexually aggressive yet emotionally cold Dirk phantom made by the brain of a relentlessly objectified, guilt-ridden, and terrified Hope boy who was likely simultaneously desperate for affirmation, intimidated by the sheer magnitude of the dysfunction of our combined emotional and interpersonal realities, dealing with the fuck ups and hangups of a dysfunctional and emotionally demanding relationship with Dirk, and prone to escapism and projection despite an intuitive knack for sussing out core concepts (Brain Ghost Dirk through my very biased Jake specs), 

5) one poor, sweet, self-sacrificial Brobot (of whom I will hear nothing negative), 

and. 

Well. 

6) every iteration of canon me.

And lucky number 7) every extra iteration of one lonely boy who loves his friends but doesn’t know how to be happy, including the poor kid who got Game Over and the one who was gaslit in one branch of Pesterquest, if you want to be timey-wimey about it. We’ll round this up to a total of at least one extra splinter self of Classic Dirk Strider™ in entirety.

For those counting at home, that means that the identified quasi-individual splinters of Dirk Strider amount to approximately 0.2875+0.44875+1+1+1+1+1, adding up to 5.73625 out of 7.

This math means that Dirk at the end of Homestuck canon had about 18.053571429% of free unclaimed soul space for just himself, which isn't great but at least has some fighting odds.

But add Epilogue Dirk as an entity, who is subject to the whims of new authors and whatever weird soul math they put in him for Weird Plot Shit, and you have a total soul quantity of 6.73625 Dirk splinters total to divide between at least 7 disparate portions. 

Even by taking the infinitives presented by the existence of alternate doomed timeline selves of every personality involved, all things being equally infinite and therefore infinitely self-cancelling, he’s approximately 96.23214% Dirk splinters with maybe 3.76786% of room left for himself and all his native dysfunctions, plus the unwritten decade on Earth C, in the Ultimate Self composite, with diminishing percentages of the latter if there are splinters I've missed, which I’m sure there are. 

No one’s arguing the asshole value of LE, Doc S, and Beta Bro, so that's about 24.8035% of major douchebag at baseline. 

The asshole value of the remaining proportions presents some ambiguity depending on a) how clear a picture Jake had of Dirk prime at the time he formed Brain Ghost Dirk, b) how much externalized self-hating abuse I’ve suffered and perpetuated that Dirk has been forced to internalize and process (and how well you honestly think either he or my canon self is capable of doing that in a healthy manner), and c) how much you wanna blame my man BB for having a confused idea of how to be a healthy scrumchap when I was working out my own barely pubescent roboangst through him. 

And d) Dirk’s own native asshole quotient. 

This is not counting Dirk’s suicidal Candy iteration, by the way. So divide that already meagre fraction by half due to Dirk opting out of Candy, and there’s about 1.88393% left of the Dirk who actually won the damn Game.

Less than 2% left of the guy who wants to fight the tide.

Any wonder?

It’s probably also paired with the cumulative sheer fucking terror all these splinters of Dirk have been assigned by this narrative and these authors about becoming irrelevant and not having the first clue as to how to exist, or really, how any of us can exist outside of a narrative framework with an obvious BBEG. Candy was a farce he literally could not exist in because he can’t handle the idea of surrendering to inessentiality just to be fucked around to the beat of what a certain Muse- 

(who has an iteration which, mind you, explicitly wants to absorb him into themself in one canon and implicitly just fucking hates his guts because he reminds them of their brother and ew I just realized the potential Cherubic hatemantic implications there and need a .gif of brain bleach now) 

-thinks he should do in their wish-fulfillment story.

(Which, honestly, I can’t completely blame him for, what the actual **fuck** Calliope?)

…

Anyway, before I shoot my mouth going into Doylist critique about the people who wrote the Epilogues in a realm literally beyond my (or this author’s) comprehension, and how much that fucks with this bogus soul math, according to the Meat narrative it appears to me that the conceit I am working with is that Dirk resorted to villainy in a bid to restore the vitality of a story that evaded delivering the satisfaction of recovery post-completion, the developments in the squared sequel aside. 

In a fucked up way, it seems as though there’s an attempt at a twisted compassion on Dirk’s part in there because Dirk’s trying to help kick the inertia of just slice-of-lifing it by making himself something so horrible that he has to be taken down. For the Greater Good. To give those who take his initiative the relevance he thinks they need to not be forgotten and to not lose themselves the way Dirk believes he’s lost himself within the circumstances assigned to him.

To sum up, Dirk’s been locked into a state where he doesn’t think that he’ll ever be good enough at being good for it to matter, and if the choices are to live in a world where all there is parody or all there is is villainy, he’d rather either literally die or be the villain than be essentially forgotten. He would rather kill himself or be killed than keep going on living in the question mark.

This doesn’t excuse him, which is something he knows.

He doesn’t deserve this, which is something he refuses to believe or accept because of some internalized complex about ever being the victim of anything but especially of circumstances outside his control. 

And because he’s terminally bad at recognizing his potential to be a constructive or at least supportive presence for other people while they’re going through their own bullshit instead of making it all about himself and what he’s doing.

And I get it.

Between these binaries of self-loathing and self-destruction, I want to be a third option.

I want to be evidence that we’ve had a choice to try fucking up anyway, to be held accountable, and to forgive ourselves and experience genuine love from other people. To let other people lead, or walk with me, and grow from that experience. I want to explore what else could have happened, or would happen, if I had been there, if I had the chance.

It’s not about making excuses or deserving happiness.

It’s about wanting to grow up, and doing it.

… I’ve been metaphorically standing on the precipice of hacking a narrative console for a while now, ranting in essay to put down in words why I’m doing this and to hype myself up. If I want to love Dirk to spite him, without losing myself again, I wanted to try understanding him first. Because I’m writing myself back into this story -- or, at least, different versions of this story -- and for better or worse, I am still at least foiled by his definition. I relate to these others in our lives based on how they relate to Dirk, at least until I have the chance to relate to them myself.

I don’t know how this all is going to go. 

I know I’m not prepared to be hated, even if I’m familiar with the feeling and somewhat rationally anticipate that outcome. 

As a gesture of self-love and kindness, I’m splintering myself again, leaving a copy of myself behind to keep living the lives I’ve made despite everything, beyond what I’m allowing you to see. Because goddammit, I want to be happy.

This could very well break me, but it would break me more not to try.

Thank you again for being here with me. I’ll do my best to hear what you have to say on the way.

===> Let’s go.

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah, this is incredibly self-indulgent. But we're all having fun here, right?
> 
> This is me experimenting around and also putting down some Thoughts I had fresh off the Epilogues. I'm up to date with the ^2'd business, though obviously only as much as any other fan who isn't a Patron would be. 
> 
> Call me Mu and feel free to leave comments or command prompts while I figure out if this story is going to go anywhere. Enjoy!


End file.
